Chores and Critters at the Aerie

Well, the forecasters got the weather correct to day. (Insert comment here about a stopped clock and all that.) The sun did stay out all day and the temperatures did rise to 80 degrees late this afternoon. Turned out to be a beautiful day and I spent nearly all of it outside in the yard with the tractor.

Kubota and I moved stones from the several piles I had around the edge of the yard and the huge pile I had built in the center where I once planned to build another raised bed garden. Those plans fizzled when I ran out of soil to fill the bed with. They may be resurrected again, however, as a small slump and the digging out of the slope to build the stairs last month have left me with a pretty good heaping pile of soil. Digging out the bank to create another raised bed would provide even more soil (and stone). And the digging would be much easier with the use of Kubota's backhoe.

This afternoon, I was in the process of moving some of the slumped soil and noticed one of Kubota's front tires was flat. I wrestled it off the tractor and hauled it down to the tire shop to get it repaired. Somewhere along the line today, I had run over a nail. That's not hard to imagine as even before we built the Aerie, there had been a structure here that had been removed. I'm not sure how it was removed, but it was gone when we viewed the property. Could be it was demolished on site. Could be it was hauled away. (It was a mobile home of some kind.) Could be I ran over a nail from that demolition or it could have been something from our construction process. I don't know for sure as the only evidence was a hole in the tire with nothing in it.

Any way...Got the tire fixed and put it back on the tractor and was back to work moving the soil and rocks that slumped in the heavy rains/snow melt of March and April. I'll have to think about some way of constructing a low retaining wall to hold back/slow future slumps.

******

After dinner, I stepped out on the porch to enjoy the cool breeze. There were some birds going a little nuts and I assumed they were screaming about a hawk or one of the neighbor's cats. Then, around the corner of the house where I had been digging up the slumping soil, came a black bear. I estimate his weight to be 250-300 pounds. I shouted to alert Terry and the bear bolted twenty yards into the woods. Then it looked back and slowly wandered off, totally unconcerned with my presence on the deck. Sure, my shout had startled him, but no more than my sneaking up on one of the cats and shouting, "BOO!"

So that's a deer this morning and a bear this evening. We also spotted a new neighbor's cat. That brings the number of different cats to five...or is it six? We had the usual birds in the yard despite not having any feeders out. But I did see an Oriole fly across the yard while I was moving one of the vehicle out of the way of the Kubota.